The Witch of Hebron

by James Howard Kunstler

  The company of someone like Barbara Maglie was not something he would have known outside of the extraordinary event of his sudden illness in strange surroundings, and he was not a little amazed at how much he enjoyed her. They couldn’t have come from more different backgrounds, yet they were so much alike in spirit they could finish each other’s sentences after a couple of days together. She was in every other way an embodiment of what his parents had warned him about in fast Yankee city women, but he couldn’t help smiling to think back on the movements of her body, her striking costumes, her lovely silver hair, her expressive long-fingered hands, her goddesslike face, and her voice, like a certain kind of fiddle music played slowly in the lower registers. He was sure he would see her again, and, indeed, as the wagon trundled along, her visage seemed superimposed in his imagination over the lovely vistas of the autumn fields and sky. And then there was the question of the boy.

  When, late that day, he returned to his people in the old Union Grove high school, among the first things he did was dispatch a message to the doctor, requesting a visit from him to evaluate his recovery, with an added request that might as well have been a demand to bring the boy with him. He sent Brother Asa to fetch them in the early evening for the short ride across town. The boy had maintained his strange stoical calm since returning, and his demeanor unnerved his father and mother, who continued to have the impression of harboring a stranger in their house.

  “Will you let me stay in the room when you examine him?” was all Jasper said to his father on the short trip over.

  “All right,” the doctor said.

  Brother Asa dropped them off at the front entrance of the old school where Brother Boaz met them and escorted them inside to Brother Jobe’s suite of rooms.

  “Close the door, please,” Brother Jobe said, propped up in bed with account books in his lap. He followed the visitors over the top of his reading glasses with a severe look. Brother Boaz withdrew and shut the door, leaving the doctor and Jasper triangulated with Brother Jobe.

  “That boy of yours carved me up like a Christmas turkey,” Brother Jobe said. “Probably lucky he come along and done it, too,” he added, and the severe look transformed itself into something more forbearing. “Anyway, here I am, still amongst the living, and no more aching guts. I never did have a bellyache like that before. Tell you the truth, it was a goldurned miracle they found him when they did. I’m mighty grateful. And I never did get a chance to say thank you, son.”

  The doctor glanced at Jasper, who returned the look without betraying any particular emotion.

  “Mind giving me a once-over, doc?” Brother Jobe said.

  “Sure,” the doctor said. “Would you come out of the blankets and lift your nightshirt.

  The doctor took Brother Jobe’s temperature, his pulse, listened to his heart and lungs, removed the cloth dressing on his abdomen, and peered closely at the sutures between his hip and his belly button.

  “Nice work, Jas,” he said, looking over to the boy, who remained in place across the room. “I’ll take out these stitches in a few days,” he said to Brother Jobe. “The wound looks clean and is healing nicely.”

  “I had a peach of a nurse.”

  “I think I know her.”

  “A woman like that give a man reason to live,” Brother Jobe said. “If you know what I mean.”

  The doctor smiled uncomfortably. “You should take it very easy for a couple of weeks,” he said. “You don’t want the slightest risk of infection. Stay away from livestock, especially. Anything gets to feeling funny, you send for me right away.”

  “I’ll do that. I’m going to pay you, too. And the boy in particular.”

  The doctor did not pursue the subject. It only made him more uncomfortable.

  “But would you mind leaving the two of us alone for a minute?” Brother Jobe said to him, readjusting his nightshirt and bedclothes. “Me and your boy got some bidness don’t concern you.”

  The doctor hesitated a moment, then blew out a sigh and shrugged his shoulders.

  “I guess so,” he said, shooting Jasper a glance. He left the room, shutting the door behind him.

  “Come over and sit in this here chair beside the bed, son,” Brother Jobe said.

  Jasper moved tentatively toward the chair and sat down.

  “Been quite a time for you out there, at large in the county, hasn’t it?”

  Jasper shifted in his seat but said nothing.

  “Fell into some interesting company. Seen some interesting things.”

  Jasper remained silent. A big clock on a chest of drawers ticked noisily.

  “Anyways, you done me the greatest turn a fellow human being can do for another. I wonder what you got to say for yourself. Speak to me, son.”

  Jasper hesitated and something caught in his throat when he spoke. “I did what I was taught to do,” he said.

  “Yes, and you done it first-rate, too. I’m surely grateful. But the fact remains that you killed my horse.”

  For the first time in days, Jasper betrayed emotion. His mouth twitched, his pupils contracted, his breathing went shallow and short, the color left his face, and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

  “What do you got to say about it?”

  Jasper didn’t know what to say. He was sure that saying he was sorry was not adequate.

  “He was a fine horse, a brave and good-natured animal,” Brother Jobe said. “He was only defending himself when he reared up on that dog of yours that was running around his legs, barking and snapping and carrying on. He was as much a friend of mine as that dog was a friend of yours.”

  Jasper could no longer restrain his tears.

  “What I want to know is, how’d you kill him?”

  Jasper began to weep loudly and shook his head.

  “Tell me, boy!”

  The doctor opened the door and intruded in the room.

  “Get out of here!” Brother Jobe boomed and fixed his gaze on the doctor’s. As their eyes locked, the doctor turned helplessly and withdrew from the room as if obeying a command he had no power to resist.

  “You ain’t answered my question, boy,” Brother Jobe growled at Jasper. “Look at me!”

  Jasper just sank deeper within himself.

  Brother Jobe leaned forward and seized Jasper’s face in one hand and positioned his own reddening face close to the boy’s so they could not avoid each other’s eyes. Then he raised an index finger to the outside corner of his right eye and drilled his gaze into Jasper’s.

  “I’m amongst your own mind now, son,” Brother Jobe said. “Can you feel me in there?”

  “Yes,” Jasper said.

  “You going to do like I say?”

  “Yes.”

  “Answer my questions?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’d you kill my horse?”

  “Opium.”

  “Must have been a lot.”

  “Enough to kill a horse,” Jasper said.

  “I know you’re not trying to be funny.”

  “I’m not.”

  Brother Jobe relaxed his grip on Jasper’s face and dropped his hand, but remained very close.

  “I’ll tell you something private,” he said. “If a horse killed my dog when I was a boy, I might have felt exactly like you did. Thing is, we didn’t have no horses when I was a boy. It was all cars. But if a car done it, I’d’a poured Karo syrup in the ding-danged gas tank or something.”

  Jasper only blinked in reply.

  “You got your mind in a dark place, son. I’ma do something about that just like you brought my body back from the darkness. I can see all kind of things that have happened to you in the days just past. I know who you been with and what all has been done in your presence and your own actions in it. You ain’t ever going to lose those memories, but your mind’s going to be different with it. Like something you read in a storybook. You going back to being a boy for a while. You going to leave that darkness behind. You hear what I’m saying?”


  “Yes.”

  “You ain’t going to be afraid or sad no more. You going to feel the love and goodness of this world. You going to be happy in your home and family. You going to be a boy again and grow into yourself like a natural man will. Hear what I’m saying?”

  “Yes.”

  “The only thing you ain’t going to remember is this here little talk we just had, at least the way it was. You going to tell your daddy that I just gave you some Jesus and said that you was a good boy and thanks for doing what you done for me and all like that. Hear?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right then. I’m going to leave you to your own mind now when I’m done counting backwards from five.”

  Brother Jobe counted. Jasper blinked again and turned to look at the door.

  “You can be on your way now, son. Thanks again.”

  Jasper nodded and smiled. Then he leaned in close and whispered to Brother Jobe, “Want to know something funny?”

  “Sure.”

  “People think you’re the devil.”

  Brother Jobe laughed, a high, creaking sound, like a door opening.

  “Only on Halloween, son.” he said. “And it’s done gone for this year, thank the Lord. Rest of the time I’m just a sawed-off ugly old cracker with a few tricks up my sleeve. Get along now.”

  Jasper got up and found his father out in the hall. The doctor detected something different in the boy’s demeanor. His shoulders seemed less rounded and a light was back in his face that had been missing since his return.

  “What was that about?” the doctor asked.

  “Just some Jesus and thanks and all,” the boy said. “Is this a school night?”

  “Yes,” the doctor said. “It’s Wednesday.”

  “Good,” the boy said. “Let’s go home.”

  EPILOGUE

  Two days after Brother Jobe’s return, Brother Seth rode his blue roan, Ollie, back into the highlands west of Hebron and found the bodies of the panther and Perry Talisker where they’d been left under a rock pile beside the road. He skinned the panther and conveyed the hermit’s body a quarter mile down the road below the rocky defile to a place in the woods where he dug a proper grave and buried him, allowing a few minutes for recitation of the Twenty-third Psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.…” On his way home he stopped at Barbara Maglie’s cottage, hoping to find a good hot meal, but he arrived just as another man, a prosperous-looking stranger of about forty from Arlington, Vermont, was unloading several large hams from a horse cart in her dooryard drive. She recognized Seth with a smile but did not invite him to stop. Seth tipped his hat and smiled back. Then he rode home to Union Grove, making do with the ration of corn bread, cheese, and pickles that he had packed that morning.

  The Reverend Loren Holder returned to the village of Argyle with Robert Earle and Tom Allison to bring Miles English to the jail in the old Union Grove town hall, where he would await the disposition of his case for trafficking in children and other charges. Stephen Bullock had issued the necessary writs and was all for mounting a prosecution. But Miles English saved everybody the trouble. He had hanged himself from a floor joist in the dank cell under the stable behind his store, using the rope he had been bound with to accomplish it, in a space too low to even stand in comfortably. His knees barely scraped the floor where he hung. Loren, Robert, and Tom brought his body to the Argyle cemetery, along with the little body of the dead boy, and committed them both to the earth. The boys that Loren had liberated from Miles English could not be returned to their families, since they had none left, so they took up happy residence with Loren and Jane Ann. The youngest of them, Jesse, proved to be deaf, not mentally defective or ill, and began a tutelage in signed speech with the town polymath, Andrew Pendergast.

  The evening before Thanksgiving, Brother Elam appeared at the door of the doctor’s house with a two-month-old puppy tucked under the collar flap of his long wool coat. He asked for the doctor’s boy, and the doctor invited him to step in because it was sleeting out and near freezing and they were running the woodstoves now. The big ex-soldier entered the front hall, a figure so intimidating that little Dinah shrank up the stairs at the sight of him. When Jasper came in from the kitchen, where he’d been shelling butternuts for his mother, it took him a moment to see the little dog sheltered in Elam’s coat.

  “The boss thinks this might be a good home for her,” Elam said. “He says you’ll be able to feed her and care for her.”

  Jasper looked to his father.

  “Yes, we will,” the doctor said.

  Elam took the twelve-pound puppy out of his coat and handed him to Jasper, who backed into the seat of a wing chair, holding her in his arms.

  “What’s her name?” Jasper asked.

  “She don’t have one,” Elam said. “We got three more where she come from and we didn’t want the little ones getting too attached. You call her whatever you like.”

  “I’m going to call her Robin,” Jasper said. “Tell Brother Jobe.”

  “I’ll let him know,” Elam said.

  As the population had declined in this corner of the place still thought of as the United States, the coyotes had interbred with the eastern timber wolves migrating down from Canada until a very robust breed of carnivores ran the hills of Washington County in regular circulating packs, electrifying those who heard their keening cries in the cold, lengthening nights. One of those nights between Thanksgiving and Christmas of the year that concerns us, a pack ventured onto the property of Barbara Maglie in the rural township of Hebron. She was inside, warmly entertaining a visiting planter from Sunderland, Vermont, with scallops of pork—which he had brought with him—sautéed with sage and plenty of butter. She was unaware of the wolves digging into the shallow grave of Billy Bones two hundred yards away. His body was very much intact due to the generally cold weather that followed his interment, but it had ripened nicely. The wolves removed him from his place of retirement and scattered his remains where no one would ever find them.

  In the months and years to come, the story of the outlaw Billy Bones entered into local legend. His image was as colorful as his true persona had been in the world but tilted somewhat to a more benign, friendly view, as is often the case in the folkloric afterlife of psychopathic killers, who are remembered more fondly than they deserve to be. One of his surviving victims had even recorded a few stanzas of the bandit’s infamous ballad, to which many more would be added by others over the years to come. His ghost was said to haunt the roads and byways of the county, particularly the highlands between Hebron and the old city of Glens Falls and especially around Halloween, the time of year when he was reputedly slain by a rival who was jealous for the affections of a woman, a silver-haired beauty who was either a prostitute or a witch, depending on the version of the tale.

  Table of Contents

  EPILOGUE